History and aesthetic of computer animation and virtual reality. Notes on Los Angeles in the 1980s and the computer animation community of that time. Miscellaneous commentary on the archaeology of the cold war, as well as notes on the esoteric knowledge as it manifests in popular culture, cinematic theory, the hollow earth, espionage, corruption in civic governance, the aesthetics of conspiracy theories, the failure of the cultural myth and other related topics.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

It
is with some nervousness that I announce my candidacy for the
Executive Committee of ACM SIGGRAPH as “Member at Large”.

A
“member at large” is one who has a vote but has no particular
responsibility besides participating int he discussion and voting on
the issues. I would not want the responsibility of being Treasurer,
for example, or President.

So
there are three things to discuss: why I am running, what I would do
if elected and finally the mechanics of being allowed to run for
office. The third issue, how to get nominated, is the least
interesting, but of critical importance. I want to discuss this
first, and then get into the more complicated matters of why and what
I would I do.

To
run for the board of SIGGRAPH, one must stand for election and be
voted in by the entire membership. But, in order to stand for
election one must either be nominated by a nominating committee or
one must run a write-in campaign and get a certain number of
signatures from members of national SIGGRAPH. The number of
signatures required is 1% of the current national membership which
translates to between 90 and 100 people. 100 to be safe as usually in
these matters a few signatures will be disallowed for one reason or
another.

I first attended national SIGGRAPH in 1980, but I had been attending local SIGGRAPH since 1978 or so

Obviously,
running a write-in campaign is a hassle, why not just be nominated by
the Committee? Good question. The answer is that I tried but they
failed to nominate me. I had a very pleasant and informative
meeting with the Committee which I found quite entertaining but it
did not result in my nomination. I may have given the Committee
some reason to believe that I would work in support of issues that
they did not think were appropriate for SIGGRAPH to be concerned
about, such as the collapse of computer animation production
employment in this country and its failure to be provide substantial
employment outside of the Entertainment industries.

But
even if it turned out that my ideas were not appropriate and
practical, I think it is of great importance that we discuss these
issues and see to it that we can do what we are allowed to do. At
the very least, SIGGRAPH can acknowledge that there is a problem
instead of blissfully ignoring it and enticing people into a field
where they will not be able to work. Which has been their policy for
over a decade. Archaeology can make it clear what the odds are of a
budding archaeologist to work in that field, Computer Animation can
as well.

'

There
is also some belief out there that SIGGRAPH only wants educators to
be on the Executive Committee, which, if true, is a very bad idea on
their part and certainly needs to be discussed with the membership.
The strength of SIGGRAPH was always interdisciplinary and serving the
interests of any one or two groups would be contrary to the spirit
that made SIGGRAPH the phenomenon that it once was and which it is
not any longer.

Whatever
their reasons may be, SIGGRAPH allows for nominations of another
sort. In this second path to nomination, one must collect the
signatures of 1 percent of the eligible members of national SIGGRAPH.
I believe that translates to roughly 90 or 100 signatures. If one
gets those signatures in a proper format then one can run for
election. One still has to be elected by the general membership of course. This just gets you on the ballot.

I
will discuss in future posts why I believe I am qualified and why I
bring a legitimate point of view to the board of SIGGRAPH. But at
the very least, should I be elected, I will write about what
decisions SIGGRAPH makes and why in a form that may be of interest to
those of us who are not educators per se. Thus, at the very
least, I think I will provide a useful service should I be elected.

And
so I am asking my friends and colleagues to find me at SIGGRAPH in LA
this year and, if you are a member, sign a petition to allow me to
run for election. If it were possible to put up some sort of notice
at your place of work or anyplace else you think that SIGGRAPH
members might be, that would also be helpful. Or if you are not
attending this year, but are a member, and you want to help, contact
me and we can make arrangements for you to sign a petition without
having to track me down on site.

Even
if I get the appropriate signatures, and even if I am elected, I am
chronically underfunded and I may have to make special arrangements
to actually serve on the board. But I won't worry too much about
that now nor should you. If I am elected, I am sure I can scrounge
something up for airfare and hotel or whatever else this activity
will cost.

I
want to leave you with the thought that we once believed that
SIGGRAPH was very important in creating this revolution and that we
owe it to the organization and its history to try and make it as good
as it can be in the circumstances of the tragedy of its simultaneous
great success and failure which is the situation that we have today.